Oddvar Håland Moe's Blog

I have had this issue at a customer. We could not find out why the deployment stopped at various times. We did not find any pattern at all. The Advertisment status reported this error messages:
The task sequence execution engine failed executing the action (Apply Operating System) in the group (Install Operating System) with the error code 2147942977

Action output: *********\SMSPKGD$\***00114\ before releasing

Released the resolved source ********.*****.******\SMSPKGD$\***00114InstallImage( g_InstallPackageID, g_ImageIndex, targetVolume, ImageType_OS, g_ConfigPackageID, g_ConfigFileName, bOEMMedia ), HRESULT=80070241 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\client\osdeployment\applyos\applyos.cpp,373)

WIM error:C:\Program Files\********\*****.***

Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source. (Error: 80070241; Source: Windows)

Unable to apply (0×80070241)

Installation of image 1 in package ***00114 failed to complete..

Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source. (Error: 80070241; Source: Windows). The operating system reported error 2147942977: Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source.

And also this message:
The task sequence execution engine failed execution of a task sequence. The operating system reported error 2147942977: Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source.

I then started investigating the servers event logs. I found the following event in the application log when this happened:

It turned out that the SCCM was installed on a x86 server and therefore SQL could not get enough ram to do its thing. Therefore when we deployed a machine the deployment was interrupted, because the server was forced to unload due to memory pressure.

So a solution is to move the installation to a X64 server with X64 version of SQL to get more memory. Or tune your current setup.

In order to launch ftp client from mRemote you can do this to define it as an external application:

Arguments start with a <space>.

For many this is basics, but for some reason I seem to forget this from time to time. Therefore I have chosen to create a blog post to remember the steps.

Create the Office 2010 package as you normally would. Copy the Office CD to a share and add it as a New Package.
Remember to create the MSP file using the setup.exe /admin switch. These are the settings I use normally:

Microsoft Outlook 2010 – Account Settings – Exchange – Automatically Configure profile
based on Active Directory Primary SMTP Address = Enabled

Microsoft Outlook 2010 – Account Settings – Rss Feeds – Turn of RSS Feature =
Enabled

Add Property HIDEUPDATEUI = TRUE

Set Outlook Profile to Modify Profile

I normally use a KMS server for key management. But this depends on the environment. Then you save these changes to office2k10Silent.msp and save it in the root of the office folder where setup.exe is located. In order to integrate the language pack as part of the setup I then copy the needed folders from the language pack cd:

Every folder that is needed ends with the name of the language. (in my case .nb-no)
I then copy the config.xml file from the enterprise.ww or the proplus.ww folder to the same location as setup.exe is located. This name of this folder varies from the version you are deploying. Then I edit it like this:

<Configuration Product=”ProPlus”>
    <Display Level=”none” CompletionNotice=”no” SuppressModal=”Yes” AcceptEula=”Yes” />
    <AddLanguage Id=”match” ShellTransform=”yes”/>
    <AddLanguage Id=”en-us” />
    <AddLanguage Id=”nb-no” />
    <OptionState Id=”OfficeMUI” State=”Local” Children=”force” />
</Configuration>

Notice the match switch. When that is set the installation will find out if the OS is English or Norwegian and install the Office GUI with that language.
We then need to specify how to run the installation. I create a program inside the office 2010 package that runs the following command:
setup.exe /adminfile office2k10Silent.msp
That’s it. The config.xml file will be read because it is in the root of the directory. Microsoft documentations states that MSP files and updates can be put in the updates folder of the installation. This works great. The only thing I have noticed is that office
completely installs the entire office suite and then runs the .MSP file and “peels” of the options that you have chosen to exclude.

Happy deployment!

Had a strange problem today with webdav. I installed sccm as i normally do. After I got the console up and running I noticed that the Managment Point failed to install on the server. The log said:
The WebDAV server extension is either not installed or not configured properly.
Solution: Make sure WebDAV is installed and enabled. Make sure there is an authoring rule that allow “All users” read access to “All content”. Make sure the WebDAV settings “Allow anonymous property queries” and “Allow property queries with infinite depth” are set to “true” and “Allow Custom Properties” is set to false.

I checked things out and everything appeared correctly, but still no cigar. I then found out that the XML file that IIS writes to actually never got changed when I changed settings in IIS. The file was located here:
C:\windows\system32\inetsrv\config\schema\WebDAV_schema.xml

I then checked the security rights on the file and noticed that SYSTEM and Adminstrators only had read access……. Okay. So I changed the rights to full controll for both SYSTEM and Administrators. I then changed the settings in IIS and voila. It worked.

I had a case recently when I was expanding a data disk on a server from 250GB to 280GB. Operating system on the server was 2008. I did the same as I always do. Expanded the disk in Vmware first, then ran the diskpart extend command. Everything seemed as normal, until I checked the disk size in Explorer. WTF the disk was not expanded, but diskpart reported another size. I checked disk managment console and it told me the same as diskpart. Okay….. Strange… So I checked the uptime for the server and it had not been booted for a while. I also tried to run diskpart, shrink querymax. This command reported me that there where not enough memory available to execute the command. So I booted the server. When the server was up again I tried the shrink querymax command again. It reported that I could shrink the volume with 3GB. So I shrinked the volume with 1GB and that run successful. Then i ran the extend command again and everything reported fine in disk managment and explorer…… Strange….

I use the fantastic program mremote all the time. I just upgraded to mremoteng that supports tsg by the way.
I usually add the password to a folder that contains a lot of connections and as times goes by I seem to forget the password. So I found out a genius method for retriving the password. I just created a external application and send %password% as a parameter into the application.

When this is done you can right click a connection and choose external application and choose the one you have created:

And just like that CMD starts and echos my password:

www.mremoteng.org

Sometimes when you upgrade/install over office 2003 you will experience that .doc, .xls and .ppt does not work anymore. One way to fix this is to go to programs and features and change the office 2007 installation and choose repair. Another “cool” method is running the following commands:

winword /r

Excel /r

powerpnt /r

This will fix the association problem

I struggled to understand what time that was beeing used when I entered a mandatory assignment time. Lets say you have a computer standing in Australia and the other is standing in london and you want to install the software on the evening at 1800 locale time on both computers. That beeing said the sccm server that I make the configuration from is standing in Norway. This means there are 3 time zones involved. The good news is that when I type in 1800 this is the time local to the client. So the software will install 1800 London time and 1800 Australian time.

If I on the other hand wanted the software to be installed on the computers in all the time zones at once I could enable UTC. Then the computers will not wait until 1800 local time. Lets say the time was 1600 when I set the installation time to 1800. All the computers would start installing after 2 hours.

First we need to convert this hex based error message to decimal. In order to do this we can actually use the good old SET command.
To convert hex 0×80070652 we use the last 4 numbers and type this command:
set /a c = 0×652

This command will give the output 1618. In order to read the error message we simply type:
Net helpmsg 1618

This will give us this output that explains the reason for the error message:

When I attended TechEd 2009 in Berlin I got a lot of information regarding R3 of SCCM 2007. It is supposed to become beta in Q1-Q2 2010. There are a lot of cool stuff regarding power managment, but there is also some improvments to the sccm admin console.

Here is a screenshot of the ability to mark a computer/system and right click it and choose to either add it to an existing collection or to add it to a new collection. This could be a time saver.

Here is a screenshot of the ability to right click a collection and Choose Add Resources. This means that you can easily search for a computer and add it easy into a collection. Great stuff, I’m looking forward for the beta.

There is also something new called fast collection evaluation. This you enable on the different collections. This setting only applies to newly discovered systems. Like right after a operating system deployment or a newly added computer to the domain. It reduces the discovery time to 5 minutes when this is enabled.

So all us SCCM geeks have a lot of stuff to look forward to when the beta arrives.